


Kettlebottom

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Band of Brothers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-11
Updated: 2007-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:45:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First Sergeant Carwood Lipton goes looking for a black horse.  A missing scene in the Ardennes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kettlebottom

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Revely for the beta. Happy Holidays!
> 
> Written for Captain Xiao

 

 

Kettlebottoms was what the coal miners called them in West Virginia. Carwood Lipton had first heard the word when he was a boy, when his father had come home from the coal mines one weekend. That was the day his father had come home and told his mother and brother and him that Joe Billings had been killed, and when his mother asked how it happened he said the word: "Kettlebottom," like it explained everything.

Later Lipton would learn what they were - prehistoric tree stumps fossilized to stone, their bottoms worn smooth as the miners moved through layers of earth toward the coal's black vein. You'd know them, his father had said, by the shape of them, black and rounded like a kettle's base in the mine shaft's ceiling above you, each of them weighing several tons. The miners gave them a wide berth. The mining company marked them with string because as the earth moved, the stump dislodged and crushed whatever was underneath.

Joe Billings had found one they hadn't yet seen, and so the kettlebottom dropped down and he was gone.

Lipton remembered how afraid he'd been that day. He hadn't realized death could happen like that - so random, so sudden. Big Joe Billings had always seemed more alive than life - the way he'd lifted Lipton up with one hand on the porch one evening, the wide smile, the laugh, Lipton's hands locked on Joe's forearm, thick and strong as a tree limb.

But Lipton was far away from Huntington, and Joe and his father were both dead now, his father's death just as senseless and sudden, the car spinning out, the crush of metal on wood. And even here in the Ardennes, the kettlebottoms were settled, invisible, all above Lipton and his men, death just hanging there, waiting for someone to stand too close or too still or for too long in the wrong place.

Today he was thinking about the one that hit Hoobler, the Lugar shot that had sent Lipton and Shifty into a foxhole. Shifty'd looked around with that way he looked for things, like a deer that could hold still and see and hear the whole woods, the whole world. No one there, he'd said, but Hoobler was dead 10 minutes later anyway.

Lipton had sat with Doc Roe and Compton, the rest of the men melting back into the fog as the Jeep pulled away with Hoobler on board. He'd sat with the two men until he couldn't stand the silence anymore.

Hoobler had talked with glee about the shot that had taken the German officer down ("I'm a helluva shot, ain't I?"), and someone had wondered about the horse, hoping it was all right.

So when Lipton couldn't take Roe's pale, silent mask and Buck's recitations about the waste of it all -- Hoobler's stupid chance, his stupid mistake -- he got up and picked up his rifle and headed for the road.

It was easy to pick up the horse's tracks, the hoof prints not yet covered by the near-constant snow. The German's body wore a dusting of the thick flakes but the blood, frozen against his battleship gray of his helmet around the jagged hole of Hoobler's shot, was visible from where Lipton had left the woods for the road.

Someone had rifled all the officer's pockets, his boots and socks and gloves all gone. The horse's tracks scuffled there, and then took off in a straight line down the road for a hundred yards, then veered left into the forest.

His breath was shaking from him, a quivered puff of mist before his face. The horse had kept up the gallop, he saw, a straight line of even prints through the shattered trees.

That's why when a trail of footprints picked up beside the horse's trail - spaced far apart like a running man's are - Lipton had this crazy notion that someone had run alongside and challenged the horse to a race.

Both sets of tracks wound around to the right, toward an area of nearly untouched trees. The snow was falling more thickly now, the fog pressing in. Lipton found himself breaking into a lope now, his eyes on the tracks and the white world in front of him. That's when the black horse's shape emerged from the fog with a rider on its back.

Lipton raised his gun even though some part of him knew who it was. He could pick that profile and the way the man moved from a hundred yards. He had done so dozens of times, in fact. Just as with all the men in Easy Company, 1st Sgt. Lipton knew the way Ronald Spears moved.

Besides, who else would have been able to chase the horse down and calm it enough to be sitting on its back?

"Lieutenant Spears," Lipton said, lowering the barrel. Spears looked down at him unconcerned, as though he'd known Lipton was coming even before Lipton had thought to set out.

Spears' helmet was on the ground with a small pile of some of the lieutenant's more bulky gear. His rifle leaned up against the black body of a tree.

"Something wrong, First Sergeant?" Spears asked, clipped. His hands tightened on the worn leather of the reins, the horse's neck stilling in a perfect bend, its body coming around to point in the direction Lipton had come.

"No," Lipton said, shaking his head. "Well-yes. But nothing coming in."

Spears waited, his dark eyes on Lipton's pale face, his brows pressed down.

"But?"

Lipton tucked the rifle butt under one arm, the barrel pointed down. He looked at it, shook his head. "Nothing, sir. Just...Hoobler's dead."

"Sniper?" Spears stayed tense, ready. There was no regret, sadness, nothing in his voice. What needed to be done and who would do it. That's all that was there. Nothing more.

"No, he...took a Lugar off the officer who was riding that horse," Lipton said. "It went off. Cut the artery." He touched his own leg, shook his head.

Now Spears did look down, a quick but heavy breath puffing out. "I'm sorry, Lipton," he said. "A bad way for someone who's been through so much to cash in."

"Yes, sir," Lipton said quietly. "It sure is a bad way."

Spears looked up at him, asked: "So what are you doing out here?" he asked.

And Lipton couldn't think of the first thing to say. What would he tell him?

"You know, sir, I'm not sure myself." It was the most true thing he could say.

Spears nodded, thinking for a long moment. "You think there's something you could have done." It wasn't a question.

"Sir?"

The snow fell into the quiet between them, filling it. The cold was seeping through.

"To keep Hoobler from dying," Spears said. "Something you could have done...or should have done. That's why you're out here looking for this horse, isn't it? Hoobler's gone, but the horse..."

Lipton said nothing. He felt cold and heavy, but something like warmth crept into his face. He shook his head.

"You know anything about horses, First Sergeant?" Spears asked, the conversation veering, and Lipton looked up.

"When you see someone riding a horse, it looks like the man's in control, doesn't it?" he said, patting the animal's coal-black neck.

"Sure," Lipton said, waiting.

Spears continued. "When a rider is in the saddle, the horse seems to be doing what the rider wants." He shrugged. "Maybe the horse has been forced to do it. Maybe it does it because it respects the man, you know?"

Lipton nodded. "I guess."

Spears stopped stroking the short drape of the horse's mane. "But what you have to understand about horses, Lipton, and that the man's only *seems* like he's in control. That's how most people get thrown, hurt. They forget that no matter who they are, how long they ride...in the end, a horse will do just what it wants. And there's nothing a man can do about that."

Spears threw his leg over the saddle, slid down, the cold ground unyielding beneath his feet. He held up a German-gloved hand toward the animal's nose, and it looked down at him - huge dark eyes like pools of oil.

Lipton watched them look at each other and held his breath. The horse's sides quivered as Spears held still, and then it reared, turned, and was gone in a rush of snow. Lipton watched it go until even the hoof beats were lost.

Spears was gearing back up, and by the time he'd placed his helmet on his dark head, Lipton nodded, a small smile on his face.

"Thank you, sir," he said quietly, and Spears nodded back.

"Come on," he said, slinging on the blunt shape of his machine gun on last. "We better get back. You never know what's going to start dropping out here, and besides," he smiled faintly. "It's cold as hell out here."

"Yes sir," Lipton said, falling in beside him as they headed back. "Even colder than that."

***

 

 

 


End file.
